21st Century Learning in Schools – A Case
Study of New Technology High School in Napa, CA

By Bob Pearlman

We have known for years what kids need to know and be able to do in the
21st Century. Starting with the SCANS report, “What Work Requires
of Schools”, in 1991, it was clear that 21st Century Learning
was to be built on a foundation of basic knowledge, but went well beyond
basics to include a significant set of 21st Century Skills.

SCANS anticipated the profound changes coming in the 1990s, including globalization
and the increased role of technology in work and life. It was the first
significant report that argued that kids would need to be smarter and also
better communicators, collaborators, and performers for the workplace and
society of the future.

In Learning for the 21st Century, issued in 2003, the
Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) updated and enhanced
SCANS. Learning again builds on core subjects, but shows that 21st
Century learning includes information and communication skills, thinking
and problem-solving skills, interpersonal and self-directional skills, and
the skills to utilize 21st Century tools such as information
and communication technologies (ICT). But what sets Learning apart
from all previous studies is its finding that assessment and feedback to
students is the key to skill mastery.

In the US
and other countries, particularly Europe and Asia,
leaders are grappling with making schools that serve the needs of the 21st
Century. In Singapore, where the national slogan is "Thinking Schools,
Learning Nation", Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the minister of state for
trade, industry and education, says that “one of the key adjustments under
way is in the way we educate our young so as to develop in them a willingness
to keep learning, and an ability to experiment, innovate, and take risks,
Our ability to create and innovate will be Singapore’s most important asset
in [the] future.” (July, 2002).

In the UK,
the national government’s $80 Billion Building Schools for the Future (BSF)
program aims to rebuild every secondary school in the country over a 10-15
year period. BSF’s mission is “Working together to create world-class, 21st-century
schools - environments which will inspire learning for decades to come and
provide exceptional assets for the whole community.”

So while we and others have a good picture of what kids need to learn and
be able to do, key questions remain. How do they learn it? How do students
know they know it? And what do schools look like where 21st Century
Learning takes place?

Designing 21st Century Schools and Learning starts with “what
knowledge and skills do students need for the 21st century?”
But real design needs to go much further and address these questions:

What learning curricula, activities, and experiences,
foster 21st Century learning?

What assessments for learning, school-based and
national, foster student learning, engagement, and self-direction?

Every country has done a good job of articulating the knowledge and skills
that students need, but few have developed or identified the curricula,
assessments, facilities, and technology that would foster 21st
Century Learning.

New TechnologyHigh School – A
Case Study of a 21st Century School

Walk into a classroom at NewTechnologyHigh School
in Napa, CA,
and you will see students at work -- students writing journals online, doing
research on the internet, meeting in groups to plan and make their web sites
and their digital media presentations, and evaluating their peers for collaboration
and presentation skills. Another teacher’s students may also be there, in
a team-taught Interdisciplinary course. These activities have a name and
a purpose. It’s an example of Project-Based Learning and it’s designed to
engage students in learning deeply.

Despite its name, NTHS is not a technology school, although there is more
technology at the school than any school you may ever have seen. NTHS was
founded in 1996 as a 21st Century School. A task force led by
the business community but including educators and civic leaders studied
best practices throughout the US
and launched a school with that aim.

In its first years New Tech teachers defined the schools 8 Learning Outcomes:
content standards, collaboration, critical thinking, oral communication,
written communication, career preparation, citizenship and ethics, and technology
literacy. These outcomes map to the SCANS standards, which inspired them,
and also to more recent articulations of 21st Century Skills.
The New Tech teachers designed them not to be a wall poster, or a compendium
no one looks at. Instead, NTHS embeds these learning outcomes in all projects,
assessments, and grade reports.

Students graduate from New Tech demonstrating mastery of the 8 Learning
Outcomes through a Digital Portfolio. The portfolio, which New Tech calls
a Professional Portfolio, is a public online document that is alive on the
NTHS web site throughout the student’s career at the school. It is a work-in-progress
until the end of the senior year, when it is submitted for graduation.

Project- and Problem-Based Learning – Keys to 21st Century
Learning

“We needed a new type of instruction that better reflected the goals we
wanted each student to achieve, demonstrate, and document”, says Paul
Curtis, one of the original lead teachers at NTHS and now
Director of Curriculum for the New Technology Foundation.

NTHS teachers start each unit by throwing students into a realistic or
real-world project that both engages interest and generates a list of things
the student need to know. Projects are designed to tackle complex problems,
requiring critical thinking. New Tech’s strategy is simple:

To learn collaboration, work in teams.

To learn critical thinking, take on complex problems.

To learn oral communication, present.

To learn written communication, write.

To learn technology, use technology.

To develop citizenship, take on civic and global issues.

To learn about careers, do internships.

To learn content, research and do all of the above.

How do you build all this into the curriculum? It can be done if students
work on projects that are designed to elicit collaboration, critical thinking,
written communication, oral communication, work ethic, and other critical
skills, while simultaneously meeting state or national content standards.

In traditional classrooms students typically work alone, work on short
non-complex assignments that emphasize short-term content memorization,
write for the teacher alone, and rarely make presentations.

Project- and problem-based learning takes a different approach:

Put students into teams of three or more students, who work on an in-depth
project for three to eight weeks.

Start the project by introducing a complex entry question and scaffold
the project with activities and new information that deepens the work.

Calendar the project through plans, drafts, timely benchmarks, and finally
presentation by the team to an outside panel of experts drawn from parents
and the community.

Provide timely assessments to students on their projects for content,
oral communication, written communication, teamwork, critical thinking,
and other critical skills.

At New Tech some examples of projects include presenting a plan to Congress
on solving the oil crisis, addressing economic issues as a team of the President's
economic advisors, or inventing, under contract from NASA, new sports
that astronauts can play on the moon so they can get exercise.

Calendaring is crucial. Few students, or adults, can work effectively without
a clear timetable and benchmarks. At New Tech the calendar for each project,
called the Course Agenda, is available online and linked to the project
briefcase, which holds all the project resources, calendar, and assessment
rubrics. The Project Briefcase organizes all project materials for student
access, action, and project management.

Project-Based Learning is often confused with projects, which are short
activities injected into traditional education to liven things as a culminating
event for the unit. Real Project-Based Learning, by contrast, is deep, complex,
and rigorous.

Many countries have had difficulties with Project-Based Learning in the
past, when curricula was not designed effectively and scaffolded to insure
that essential learning takes place. In Queensland,
Australia,
a new, major province-wide initiative in Project-Based Learning is called
“Rich Tasks”. In the UK,
one school calls it “Total Learning”.

How do students at New Tech High learn and master collaboration skills,
a key 21st century Skill? For all projects, students work in
project teams, with one student taking on the role of project manager. The
project team develops a contract outlining the scope of work for each student
member. Projects culminate with team reports and presentations. After the
completion of the project, each member of the team evaluates their peers
through a peer collaboration rubric.

At New Tech all teams have taken on a rule that if a students slacks they
can be voted off the team. The penalty is that the student must then do
the whole project by themselves.

Assessment for 21st Century Learning

In a recent Education Week Commentary Tony Wagner
described a rubric that principals in Hawaii
had developed to assess rigor in the classroom. The principals, Wagner writes,
“began to realize that rigor has less to do with how demanding the material
the teacher covers is than with what competencies students have mastered
as a result of a lesson.” ("Rigor on Trial", Commentary by Tony
Wagner in Education Week, January 11, 2006). The group determined to define the level
of rigor by posing these questions to students: Why is this important to
learn? In what ways am I challenged to think in this lesson? How will I
apply, assess, or communicate what I’ve learned? How will I know how good
my work is and how I can improve it?

Project- and problem-based learning doesn’t work unless a learner get feedback
to “know how good my work is and how I can improve it”. Current assessments
don’t do the job. State testing and accountability is aimed at schools,
not individual student learning, and reports only once a year, after students
have moved on to other teachers. Periodic assessments in managed curriculums
are done once a month and mainly provide information to teachers. A student
can’t get better or become the manager of his own learning without constant,
real-time assessment and feedback. This is called assessment for learning,
as opposed to assessment for school, district, or classroom accountability.

Assessment for learning starts with outcomes, proceeds with projects, products
and performances that map to the outcomes, and completes the loop with assessment
and feedback to students:

Most schools give students a single grade for a course, often losing important
data about the skills and abilities of the students. At NTHS student course
grades are disaggregated into the component Learning Outcomes. Instead of
a single composite grade for each project, subject or integrated course,
the grade report for a project or a course shows separate and distinct grades
for content, critical thinking, written communication, oral communication,
technology literacy, and any of the other learning outcomes that are appropriate
for the course. Students get a report card that reflects how well they are
performing on 21st Century Knowledge and Skills. In that way
the students knows exactly where they are performing well and where they
are not.

At NTHS the gradebook is online, accessible by password, and “living”,
i.e. it is updated whenever there is new information, not just at the end
of term. Students are thus constantly aware of their strengths and weaknesses
and can target their efforts towards improvement. This continuous and just-in-time
feedback is critical in supplying the information that helps students become
self-directed learners.

The assessment for learning feedback is also available online in real-time
to teachers and parents, who can also easily identify student strengths
and weaknesses and offer support to students.

NTHS has developed unique ways to assess certain 21st Century
Skills. At the end of every project, students assess every member of their
project team using an online Peer Collaboration rubric. Scores go to a database,
where a student through a secure password can see his or her scores, although
the evaluations are anonymous. The student can then publish these scores
as evidence for his or her digital portfolio. A similar process is done
with an online Presentation Evaluation rubric which is scored by teachers
and visiting community experts.

Schools as Workplaces for 21st Century Students

If students are to be the workers, then they need classroom learning environments
that are workplaces for both individual and group work, and that are equipped
with the technology and tools they need to do their work. Traditional school
classrooms are typically 750 to 1000 square feet for 30 or more students,
providing an environment suited only to teacher-led instruction, particularly
at the secondary school level.

Larger classrooms are needed that provide a students at work environment,
involving computers, group work, planning, presentations, team teaching,
etc. New Tech accomplishes this through double-size classrooms, 1400 to
1800 square feet, that house up to 50 students and 2 teachers in a team-taught
interdisciplinary course. The room is divided into 2 general sections, either
side-by-side or exterior ring to interior center. One section houses desktop
or laptop computers, 1 per student, wired and/or wireless, for individual
or small team work, and the other section houses flexible tables for small
group work, planning, and doubles as a presentation space for student presentations
and teacher-led planning activities or teacher lectures. No, teacher lectures
are not outlawed; instead, they are delivered on a “need to know” basis.

New Tech High looks more like a modern high-tech office than a school.
When one walks through New Tech’s glass-walled corridors, one sees students
at work.

Enrollment is 400 students for grades 9-12. The smaller size helps to establish
a more personal environment and a culture suited for individual and group
work.

Technology and the 21st Century Classroom

Technology plays a critical role in supporting 21st Century learning environments.
Providing one-to-one computing gives students and teachers the hardware
and software tools to do their work. But even more profound is when technology,
through the school’s network, provides a collaborative learning environment
that houses curriculum, assessment rubrics, living gradebooks and communication
tools.

Many schools and states in this country and others are experimenting with
one-to-one computing for students and finding the results lacking. This
is due to a traditional curricular approach that fails to engage students
as directors of their own learning. Project- and problem-based learning,
by contrast, can bring one-to-one computing to life.

By having their own computer and internet access, students at New Tech
can research any topic, communicate with experts and teachers, write journals
and reports, develop presentations through PowerPoint and video, and take
responsibility to develop their Professional Digital Portfolio demonstrating
evidence of their mastery of the school’s 21st Century Learning
Outcomes.

In theory, technology isn’t needed for project-based learning. However,
technology enables students to research, plan, and communicate. Moreover,
New Tech goes beyond one-to-one computing and provides a technology platform
that serves as a Collaborative Learning Environment for students
and teachers. This environment, the New Tech High Learning System ™, comprises
the curriculum, standards, assessment tools, and reporting tools of
Napa New Technology High School (NTHS), all online on a common IBM Lotus
Notes technology platform.

The Learning System is an enterprise solution for the whole school. For
students it is a "student-facing" system, it is the medium through
which they work and learn. Itenables
students to self-manage their work, collaborate with others, and see their
assessments and grades on a daily basis. All projects include a course agenda
or calendar, where teachers enter deadlines as well as activities for each
day including links to resources and daily assignments.

The Learning System also immediately and dynamically publishes all the
project materials to the web for access to the curriculum anywhere, anytime,
by students and their parents.

And because all projects are housed online, they are available year-to-year
even if teachers leave. Also the projects are shareable by teachers within
a school, and between schools. Currently there are 14 schools nationally
based on the NewTechHigh School model that are sharing
projects. The network schools will increase to 28 in 2006.

21st Century Learners

NTHS is a different kind of school and it produces a different kind of
student. Students report feeling safer, better known, challenged, more
engaged and more motivated for postsecondary learning. A study that surveyed
the school’s eight graduation classes (“Postsecondary Student Success Study”,
2005) strongly suggests that students feel New Tech High’s use of project-based
learning and focus on 21st century skills were important in preparing
them for college, careers, and citizenship. 98 percent of NTHS’ seniors
report postsecondary enrollment plans, compared to 67 percent that the NapaValleyUnifiedSchool District reports.
California and the US
graduate 67% and 71% of high school students, respectively, of which 32%
in California and 34% nationally
are deemed college-ready.

Further the alumni study found that 40% of all NTHS graduates, and 37%
of graduating girls, either pursue college study in, complete college study,
or work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) careers, compared
to 7% nationally. Women today constitute 45% of the workforce in the U.S.,
but hold just 12% of science and engineering jobs in business and industry.

New Tech’s 21st Century Learners are articulate, powerful, self-directed,
collaborators, and entrepreneurs.

The Globalization Challenge

Globalization is flattening the world and challenging the United
States as never before, as Tom Friedman
points out in his 2005 book, The World is Flat. Students in the U.S.
and other advanced countries must move up the value chain and lead a new
era of global cooperation as 21st century learners. Societies
need citizens who are smarter, more creative, and more capable of leading,
managing, collaborating and networking with productive people around the
world.

Schools need to be totally redesigned to enable and facilitate 21st Century
Learning. New TechHigh
School is one way of getting there. Countries
need to upgrade their educational standards to world-class standards, moving
curriculum to 100 percent in-depth project- and problem-based learning
that involves teamwork, critical thinking and communication skills, authentically
assessing for learning all these skills for immediate and active feedback
to students, redesigning and reconstructing facilities and classrooms to
enable a students at work environment for individual and collaborative
work, and finally, using technology to bind this collaborative learning
community together.

Bob Pearlman is the former
Director of Strategic Planning for the New Technology Foundation and a consultant
on designing 21st Century Secondary Schools. In 209, the New
Technology Foundation supported the replication of the NewTechnologyHigh School model in more than 50 sites and 10 states across the
United States. BYy 2013, the New
Tech Network included more than 120 sites across the country.